Bundle Up #2

The second installment in my new series based on women's coats and accessories. Sorry for the lag in updates. After my last post I could not find traction for some reason and I hope whatever was going on with me has passed for a good long time.

Bundle Up

It's so cold and wet outside these days. Today is particularly cloudy and dark on top of everything else and we still have winter to look forward to. Blah! Anyhoo, it's what inspired this collage. A colorful coat! Nothing better than a nice warm coat to keep the chills at bay. This is mostly painted tissue paper and painted drawing paper with a little soft pastel for shading.
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Mixing Mediums and Trying Out a New Palette

Fall and foul weather has finally arrived in Michigan. My good mood has gone south with the geese so I've been experimenting instead of starting a new project. I haven't worked with watercolor on gesso coated paper in ages so that was on my to-do list. I did wind up adding a little acrylic but very little and then I used soft pastel to the mix with some interesting results.

This painting is pure acrylic.

I also did a quick landscape, totally from imagination using a color palette which I found online. The Fall colors are uninspiring this year so I had to pull from other sources.

Kitty Kocktail ~ complete

I finished this one up this morning. It sat staring at me with those big soulful eyes so I had to finish it. I didn't do much actually. Just a bit here and there. Some reflections in the granite countertop, adjusted some values, darkened the tile backsplash, etc. A lot of little fiddles.

Kitty Kocktail ~ WIP 2

I had hopes this was complete but I see some things that need a tweak or two. When I first saw the image on my PC screen I thought I had gotten my grout lines in the background crooked. Turned out to be camera distortion thankfully. I think I may have breathed in enough pastel dust for awhile so I'll fiddle with this just a little bit each day until I'm satisfied and post the final end of the week.

Kitty Kocktail ~ WIP 1

I've finally begun work on this little fella. I decided not to try this in watercolor(I didn't believe I could achieve the soft fuzziness of this kitten) and opted instead for dry media. So far I've used various pastels, Caran D'Ache water soluble crayon and water soluble graphite. I also decided to work on artist quality kraft paper. I love the look of a toned paper with pastel.

Small Works ~ in progress

The rainy background is strips of newspaper glued to Yupo. The figure is soft pastel.

This one is still a work in progress. I'm not sure where its headed yet.

I'm working on a series of small 'creations' using various techniques I've been dying to try out. A little collage, some mixed media, ink...anything that floats my boat. Since these are all roughly 4" x 6", if a few fail it's no big deal. My style seems to be no style so why not go with that premise and see where it takes me. Last year I chose to stick with the alcohol ink but because my lungs have become so touchy I've been hesitant to play with these inks too often. I'm not planning to give them up by any means but I thought I'd mix things up a bit.  

Soft Pastel on Yupo ~ lounging cats

I just completed this one and scanned it. Colors are a little off as usual but it's close. This was done with SMI soft pastel on Yupo. A coating of the blending solution or alcohol ink will accept and hold the pastel. Another fine spray of blending solution will seal the pastel to the surface. I had no reference and didn't bother with a pre-drawing. I used a small, inexpensive brush dipped in rubbing alcohol to push the pastel where I wanted it to go.

Why bother with this? Because I do enjoy working with pastel once in awhile but hate the prices for custom frames with real glass. My only other option would be to buy a pane of glass and pay to have it cut to order. Not going to happen. I'm going to watch this piece to see if the pastel does indeed stay sealed and doesn't flake off eventually. If it doesn't I will probably move ahead and any paintings I create in this way will be framed with Plexi.

8/4/12 ~ I tweaked this today to sort out the awkward position of the cat in the foreground. I'm not sure I completely accomplished my mission but I think overall it reads a little better. I also added whiskers on two of the cats with a white Ziggy pen. Cats need whiskers or they just look weird, IMO. I wanted to mention that misting soft pastel with the blending solution will alter the colors. I didn't mind the blue shifting hue but I was losing the yellow. It became muddy and greenish. This time I didn't spray the yellow and it seems to be hanging on just fine. It isn't sealed to the surface but is staying in place.    

Soft Pastel on Yupo?

The pastel has been added throughout this piece but is mostly visible on the left side. I turned the stone wall into a stone cliff and added the cliffhanger(a little tree) and the opposing mountain in the bottom right corner to aid composition.

Yes! I had to try it and it worked. I've been pushing Yupo to it's limits with all my experimenting. I scored it with an awl, inked and wiped, re-inked and wiped again. I think eventually the surface does abrade creating a very slight 'tooth'. I was going for a stone wall affect, using the awl and black marker to depict the edges of the stones. At that point I wondered what I hadn't tried yet and soft pastel popped into my head. Hey, why not? I sprayed the surface with the blending solution, then as it was drying I added grey and blue pastel. Somehow when the solution dried completely the pastel was sealed to the surface. It can be removed with alcohol or blending solution just like the ink but it's there to stay otherwise.

Sydney~Completed

As it happened, this turned into more of a pastel piece with a watercolor underpainting than a watercolor with a bit of pastel. I'm glad I was working on HP paper and was pleased it took the pastel so well. The background color was decided for me when my masking fluid decided to stain my paper. }:( I've never seen it do that before. Ummmm....anyway, I've sent an image to my niece for her approval. I'd love to paint Sydney again, this time with just watercolor and probably not in this particular pose.

Establishing Color & Values with Pastel

Colorful, isn't she?

Here I've greyscaled my pastel to double check the values. Notice the arrow I've drawn to indicate my light source. Ummm...the center top of the head looks too dark. Needs tweaking.

I originally planned to print out a copy of my sketch onto cardstock and use pencil and charcoal to determine placement of the appropriate values for Sydney's portrait. Then I had the brilliant idea to get out my soft pastels and experiment with those instead. I had forgotten how messy soft pastels are and how fun they are to work with.:) Cardstock is not a good support for soft pastels and I struggled to not wipe them completely off the surface when I tried to blend them. I did the best I could but wound up digitally enhancing my results to get the color saturation I wanted.